The Ever-Faster Spinning Carousel of Biennials

René Block We Hop On, We Hop Off: The Ever-faster Spinning Carousel of Biennials

n the early sixties, when I was gathering my artistic experience, there Lars Ramberg, Liberté, 2005, mixed-media interactive were two biennials: the Venice Biennale and the Bienal de São Paulo— sculpture consisting of three toilets at Nordic Pavilion, 2007 and every five years there was documenta, in Kassel. In 1973, the Venice Biennale. Courtesy of I René Block. Biennale of Sydney joined them, virtually unnoticed at first. Since then, not even forty years have passed, and today we are confronted with so many so-called biennials, triennials, and quadriennials that it’s almost impossible to get an overall perspective on them. Some statistics speak of there now being around one-hundred-and-fifty different projects.

A few years ago, the Berlin cultural critic Marius Babias described this phenomenon as follows:

In the nineties, the rapidly increasing value of culture as a location factor in global cities that were competing for investment put heavy pressure on the urban independent scenes and artistic milieus, which led them, in an attempt to break out of their political and artistic isolation, to develop new living proposals and career strategies that in turn were gratefully appropriated by the cultural institutions that were being forced to proﬁle and legitimatize themselves. The culturally charged processes of political legitimization are evident in this merry-go-round.1

26 Vol. 12 No. 3 And then Babias gave a concrete example:

. . . the Berlin Biennale was a component of a Berlin marketing strategy. After the fall of the Wall, the art scene—closely enmeshed with the construction boom in Berlin—tracked down the spirit of the times in raw excavations, romantically ruined courtyards and clubs. That Berlin generation was swiftly constructed: creative, hungry for experience, freshly showered. And no other cultural location could be better marketed in cultural- political terms. Showplaces, long nights of museums, gallery tours, Berlin Biennale: without further ado, the capital city planners, electriﬁed by the Love Parade’s politically toned- down message “One World One Future,” bundled diverse cultural activities and lifestyles into a cultural event for the new central district—the Berlin Biennale. In the process, the boundaries between high culture and subculture, between left and right, have become, like the obligatory sparkling white wine: ﬂuid.2

Maaria Wirkkala, Vietato Lo I’ve been quoting from the lecture “On the Sharco—Landing Prohibited, 2007, installation at Nordic History and Presence of Cultural Ideology,” which Pavilion, 2007 Venice Biennale. Courtesy of René Block. Babias delivered on August 6, 2000, in Kassel, at the ﬁrst major congress of biennials. More than forty curators, artists, and organizers from some twenty biennials accepted an invitation from Kunsthalle Fridericianum and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) in Stuttgart to get acquainted, exchange experiences, and discuss relevant themes such as:

s The biennial as a location factor s The inﬂuence of biennials on the local art scene s The role of the artist within the global context: Has the world become the new studio? s The exhibition as a major event: On the ethics of curating s What still deserves support? The ever-increasing conﬂict between cultural funding organizations s Gwangju or Werkleitz, Venice or Istanbul: Where lies the future of biennials?

The three-day congress at the Fridericianum—one day was set aside for internal discussions and two days were devoted to public events—took place as part of the exhibition Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which had invited twenty-nine artists from eight places that at the time hosted biennials. In an exemplary way, the exhibition demonstrated how the international shows mounted in those eight locations every two years have inﬂuenced local art production.

It soon became clear at the conference that biennials of contemporary art develop for the most varied of reasons, but usually centre on the wish for

Vol. 12 No. 3 27 global communication. In the early 1970s, Sydney found itself cut off from Western centres and the discourse on contemporary art; in addition, there were few occasions for the exhibition of contemporary art. According to Paula Latos-Valier, the general manager of the Biennale, which has existed since 1973, the Biennale of Sydney showed itself from the start to be an important catalyst for cultural development. And after just a few years, the Biennale proved to be a great stimulus not only for the local artists but also for collectors. While São Paulo had already, in the 1950s, sought out political and economic contact with Western industrial nations through its Bienal, cities like Lima, Shanghai, and Taipei have also tried more recently to break through political isolation.

Sirous Namazi, Container, 2007, and Jacob Dahlgren, I, the world, things, life, 2004, installations at the Nordic Pavilion, 2007 Venice Biennale. Courtesy of René Block.

Likewise, yet differently, Havana initially wanted to create a network among third world nations through art and, also, according to Bienal director Nelson Herrera Isla, to provide a forum for the “mainstream centres” of the West. However in Korea’s Gwangju, its Biennale serves to demonstrate remembrance of the student revolts against the former military regime that were bloodily beaten down in 1980 and has underlined today’s process of democratization.

Yet each and every biennial can have a positive effect on global understanding—if, according to the observations of Yongwoo Lee, curator and founder of the Gwangju Biennale, there wasn’t also the threat of having the same star curators with their same artistic positions perpetually pursuing identical concepts around the globe. In view of the ever-growing presence of curator exhibitions, are we not facing the danger of global standardization?

In any case, the situation has also given rise to a number of nomadic biennial artists who operate without their own studios and, instead, develop their works on-site, all around the world. This trend doesn’t have to be considered negative, as Jean-Hubert Martin, then curator of the Biennale de Lyon 2000, pointed out, because until a few years ago, artists were dependent on the whims of the art market. It was the ﬂood of biennials that set them free.

The problem of how to ﬁnance biennials has been omnipresent, which entails a discussion about the inﬂuence of state and private patrons on

28 Vol. 12 No. 3 curatorial matters. The Shanghai Biennale, for instance, represented by its deputy director Zhang Qing, has had to struggle with many taboos: no politics, no pornography, and no violence is allowed in the art presented.

Johannesburg’s planned third Biennale in 2000 was in a precarious position and was being pulled on either side by two local politicians, with the regrettable outcome that this Biennale did not take place in Johannesburg then—and has not since. And in São Paolo, as co-curator Adriano Pedrosa explained in a public statement, this very established Bienal lost the entire curatorial team working with Ivo Mesquita toward the 2000 edition because of prolonged cultural-political conﬂicts and the untenable curatorial conditions imposed by the executive board. The team unanimously resigned.

These were some of the points under discussion at the 2000 Kassel conference. The participants afterward declared themselves in solidarity with Pedrosa and Mesquita and sent a letter of protest to São Paulo. The participants also recognized the signiﬁcance of this meeting and decided to establish an international association of biennials, modeled along the lines of associations like the AICA, CIAM, or IKT3. It became evident that many of the biennial organizers didn’t know each other and were meeting for the ﬁrst time in Kassel. Also, they didn’t know anything about the problems of other biennials and they were able to make their own experiences known during the conference. Nothing has changed in regard to many of these problems as was expressed in many case studies here in Gwangju; on the contrary, in addition to organizational problems, there may be new ones that involve the ethics of global curating.

Conceptual drawing for the 1990 Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of René Block.

My talk at the Kassel conference, which was titled “Biennales—Local Art and Global Context—An Exhibition Model for the Future, Too?” dealt with the question of what makes a biennial a biennial, particularly in relation to the mother of all biennials— Venice. My opinion about Venice had changed since my emotionally critical stance in the seventies. Venice, with its national pavilions, occupies an exceptional position, especially among the large number of biennials that are structured and organized in the same way. My critique, though, is that nations focus too rigidly on national sovereignty. The 1993

Vol. 12 No. 3 29 German pavilion was a refreshing Alfredo Jaar, Spheres of Inﬂuence, 1990, installation exception, when the Korean artist view at the 1990 Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of René Nam June Paik was shown there Block. together with the German artist Hans Haacke. But couldn’t one go further and also invite curators from other countries to decide on the entries? Or even exchange pavilions? Why shouldn’t French artists show in the German pavilion and German artists, or others, in France’s? Simply change buildings occasionally and break through the rigid system.

Seven years after the Kassel conference, at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the countries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden made an attempt in this direction with their Nordic Pavilion by entrusting me, a German curator, with the presentation of it. In the catalogue, I reiterated my suggestion about exchanging pavilions; after all, we had been speaking for years about a European Union.

And this talk put out the question of what a biennial is. What is the role Barbara Bloom, The Seven Deadly Sins, 1985, installation and, eventually, responsibility of the type of exhibition that is called view at the 1990 Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of René biennial, biennale, or bienal? A biennial should certainly not only be what Block. the term indicates: something that happens every two years. A biennial has to be a strong curatorial statement in relation to a given local situation, a global exhibition created in and for a local context.

If I follow my ideal conception of a biennial, it should be an informative exhibition that is at the same time an artistic workshop. The Venice Biennale, for instance, was never a workshop. The Venice Biennale model stands for the representation and the competition of nations. Which country has the most beautiful pavilion? Who will receive the prize? It is like the Olympic games of art—even presidents come for the opening. But communication between the curators of the pavilions and the participating artists hardly takes place in the Giardini, and there is no dialogue between Biennale artists and the local scene, either. But maybe there is no local scene. Both documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale function as global exhibitions, and though they consistently take place at their same respective

30 Vol. 12 No. 3 locations, they are not especially designed for these sites—as far as I remember, artists from Kassel have never been invited to participate.

Having been the artistic director of the biennials in Sydney in 1990 and Istanbul in 1995, it was always very important for me to reside in these cities for a longer period of time and to let my conception emerge from the particular local situation. The theme of the Biennale of Sydney reﬂected my experiences of having witnessed the development of an art scene strongly inﬂuenced by the West. Australian artists are educated in this context; their works are part of the art-discourse of the West, even though their geographical location keeps them far away from the art centres in the USA and Europe.

Ilya Kabakov, Three Russian Toward the end of the 1980s, Paintings and Explanation Board, 1969, Installation a lot of young Australian view at the 1990 Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of René artists, as well as artists from Block. many other parts of the world, were engaged in redefining conceptual, object art as well as exploring the relationship between art and life, art and reality. When I therefore suggested focusing on the readymade as a theme for the workshop, I finally came to the conclusion that the Biennale had to have a historical heart with works by Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray. A circle of works from the 1960s surrounded this inner core of artists: Nouveau Realisme, Pop Art, and Fluxus. This historical part was to have more the character of a conventional art exhibition and was placed in a museum, the Art Gallery of NSW. Another circle representing the 1970s with works, for example, by Rosemarie Trockel, Sigmar Polke, and Ilya Kabakov left room for spontaneous decisions and it too was presented mainly in the Art Gallery of NSW. The actual Biennale consisted of works from the 1980s, showing artists from Sydney and other Australian cities in dialogue with artists from all over the world. This vital, non-museum component, which was shown on five floors in an old customs warehouse in the harbour, demonstrated a new, impartial, and global presentation of a young generation in relation to the former provocative Readymade concept. Consequently, a music and performance program with the subtitle “Art is Easy” was integrated. The title of the Biennale, The Readymade Boomerang, put emphasis on the theme, and related not only to art history but also to the geographical location of the exhibition.

Five years later, for the Istanbul Biennial, I did not choose a theme based on Western art history, but tried to create an exhibition addressing the political situation of the region, where, as we recall, conservative powers were pushing their take over. Istanbul is the cultural centre of Turkey and the neighbouring Balkan region and is traditionally a multicultural melting pot that pulls part of its energy from the current conﬂict between religious fundamentalists and the free, sometimes vulgar mass media. In this situation of a rather paradoxical world, artistic creativity seems to be the only energy that is able to salve this society for the future. This of course cannot be a theme for a biennial, but it could be its motto. When I made

Vol. 12 No. 3 31 my decision for the title Orient/ation, I again wanted it to be an indicator for the geographical situation. You’ve probably realized that the word Orientation includes the word Orient within it.

The Venice Biennale model of Hüseyin B. Alptekin, Michael D. Morris, TURK TRUK, 1995, presenting an international survey truck, installation view at the 1995 Istanbul Biennial. exhibition every two years and Courtesy of René Block. having the other nations pay to be represented is simply ingenious and therefore it has often been copied. As difficult as it is to obtain governmental support for large exhibitions or for participation in exhibitions abroad, as soon as this event is called a biennial, the exhibition can be categorized and support can come more easily. The Venice Biennale exhibition model was first successfully copied with the 1950 Bienal de São Paulo. There, however, where countries did not have their own pavilions, some problems and limitations became evident. Since one country did not know what the other would be sending, and the organizers had no idea whatsoever about the quality and quantity of what would be arriving, a chaotic situation often ensued. There were fights over the best walls and placements, and artworks often could not be shown because there was no appropriate location available or the artist refused to be shown in certain company.

In light of this experience, a new biennial model was tried out for the ﬁrst time in Sydney, so I would like to call it the Sydney model. This type of smaller biennial is put into the hands of a single artistic director, and the Biennale board, responsible for the administration, appoints a curator, whose task is to autonomously select the artists and works from the countries participating and to assemble them into an art exhibition, which often has a theme. This is the model that came to be used by the biennials of Istanbul, Johannesburg, Lyon, and Berlin, and most of the newer ones.

I will spare you the entire history of documenta since its founding in 1955 by Arnold Bode, who always worked with a team, as was the customary of his generation. Only in 1972 was documenta transferred to a single artistic director who was independent and not a museum administrator—that is, the prototype of a modern curator. But when Harald Szeemann curated documenta V, in 1972, his position was ofﬁcially called “exhibition secretary.”

With documenta X, in 1997, a woman, Catherine David, from France, was entrusted with the position for the first time. She managed to arouse the curiosity of 630,000 visitors—fewer than the first Gwangju Biennale in 1995 with more than a million visitors, but more than any other previous exhibition of contemporary art worldwide. Of these visitors, twenty-five percent found their way to Kassel from abroad. More than four thousand articles about the exhibition, from brief notices to long essays, were published worldwide.

In 2012, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the second woman to hold the position of documenta curator, achieved a further increase in attendance.

32 Vol. 12 No. 3 Sarkis, Pilav ve Tartisma Yeri (On Rice and Discussion Place), 1995, installation, rice, chickpeas, installation view at the 1995 Istanbul Biennial. Courtesy of René Block.

More than 750,000 visits—not visitors—were statistically registered. Many visitors remained for several days. Bode’s original idea, to have a temporary museum in Kassel from time to time—“the museum of 100 days,” as he called it—and to endow it with exemplary works was abandoned when curatorial responsibility was handed over to a single person. Since the curator no longer has to deliver a museum-like overview of the highest standards at ﬁve-year intervals, but, instead, wants to realize his or her own ideas to proﬁle his or herself, documenta has attained the level of a biennial with special standards.

Consequently, since 1987, documenta has increasingly and demonstratively moved outside of its historic central building, the Museum Friedricianum. The art leaves the “white cube,” the mode of presentation that the West invented and worked so hard at for ﬁfty years. While museum buildings everywhere around the world become whiter and whiter, biennial artists and curators look for alternate venues, from empty factories and schools to prisons. Biennial art has become site-speciﬁc in an effort to avoid being subjected to commerce and speculation.

Comparable to documenta, which is financed almost exclusively from German sources, the Gwangju Biennale is funded by the city of Gwangju and Korean sponsors, and therefore independent from the support of foreign countries. Starting from this position, its board can decide on a theme and then invite curators with international experience, who guarantee a broad scope for the event. The first and also the third Biennale, in which I was privileged to participate as a curator, were organized according to geographic aspects, and each of the five curators was responsible for a different region of the world.

We can therefore differentiate among these three Biennale models:

s Venice: Pavilions and national autonomy; completely ﬁnanced by the participating countries, followed by the early São Paulo Bienals s Sydney: Smaller exhibitions curated by an artistic director, but dependent on the ﬁnancial participation of other countries, a model followed by most biennials in the 1980s and 90s

Vol. 12 No. 3 33 s Gwangju: Independent of foreign support, sometimes Rachel Whiteread, Untitled, 1994–95, resin, installation determines themes then invites curators. Other view at the 1995 Instanbul Biennial. Courtesy of René examples of such independence are the Berlin Biennale Block. and Sharjah Biennial

These three models are able to exist well alongside each other since the respective biennial venues are far apart geographically and have their own audiences. But they also represent the classic type of biennials, ones that have ﬁnancial support.

As we have introduced during this conference, many of the new and emerging biennials have no ﬁnancial sources, except enthusiasm, and have proven to be a sympathetic alternative form of artistic event and communication in a local context.

The explosive increase in biennials should not be regarded as an isolated development. Around the same time, another phenomenon has emerged: the growing power of the art market. In 1967 the first art fair took place in Cologne. It was organized by eighteen German galleries that joined together to create an association specifically for this purpose. Their ambitions were not commercial but idealistic ones. The aim was to promote young German art and to exchange information. Therefore, the first art fairs in 1967, 1968, and 1969 were generously funded by the city of Cologne. Naturally, the side effect was that the city was able to profile itself as a new centre of contemporary European art. Remember, in 1967 there were only the Venice Biennale and documenta, in Kassel. Art Cologne was an alternative and became a building block for a cultural metropolis.

Against all expectations, the art market was commercially proﬁtable for the galleries. Other galleries wanted to participate and copied the art fair model.

34 Vol. 12 No. 3 First Berlin and Basel, then Paris, Madrid, Chicago—even New York joined in with the Armory Show, and London with Frieze, as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, Istanbul, and countless other cities. Operating globally like the biennials, this new art market has established new rules for galleries and artists. Many artists were—and still are—dependent on this system and even became its voluntary slaves because it’s necessary to keep producing new works in order to entertain a jaded group of collectors. The artist became the clown in this system, primed to constantly come up with novel glittery superﬁcialities that cost its buyers millions.

There is one way to escape this, and Jean Hubert Martin already referred to it in 2000: the way out is the biennial in as much as they understand themselves as cultural workshops that can provide the artist with independence from galleries and the art market by offering the necessary freedom for artistic achievement and experiments.

Paweł Althamer, Draftsmen's The modern artist can decide between Congress, 2012, Berlin Biennale. Photo: Artur the global art market system and the Zmijewski. Courtesy of the artist and Berlin Biennale. global biennial system. Between glamour and cultural dialogue. The Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, curator of the 2012 Berlin Biennale, got to the heart of this in that he understood and realized the entire exhibition as a manifestation of social and cultural strategies—very much to the annoyance of cosmopolitan cultural sophisticates.

For me, this Biennale was the long hoped-for coup in the direction of an expanded deﬁnition of art, as Joseph Beuys once formulated it. It will probably take a number of years until its special quality and stature are recognized. However, it also constitutes a positive counter-image to the skeptical expectations Marius Babius voiced about the Berlin Biennale, which I quoted at the beginning.

Coming to the end of my presentation, I would like to devote a few sentences to a biennial that is homeless, that is nomadic, and that represents a completely different model. I am referring to Manifesta. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were confronted with a new political and cultural situation in Europe. The formerly isolated countries of CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) became equal and open partners to the so-called West. And the West was curious about the East.

When the president of the Venice Biennale decided in 1993 not to continue APERTO, an open project that focused on very young artists, curated by young curators, and a side project to the Biennale shown in the Arsenale, a small group of representatives of international working cultural institutions came together in Holland following an invitation by Els Barents from the Netherlands Ofﬁce for Fine Arts: Anda Rottenberg (Poland), Liliane Stepancic (Soros Center, Slovenia), Sven Robert Lundquist (Nunsku

Vol. 12 No. 3 35 Sweden), Henry Meyric-Hughes (British Council, England), and myself, at that time director of the exhibition series at ifa.

The ﬁrst meeting was in early 1994, and our self-appointed task was to analyze the new situation for young artists in Europe and to develop a new form of exhibition project as a new European Art Manifestation. In my position at ifa I was able to invite this group in the autumn of 1994 to Stuttgart for one of our meetings on the occasion of the opening of Iskele at the ifa gallery, probably the ﬁrst exhibition presenting the new Turkish art scene. At that time, I wished to introduce to my colleagues a new and unknown spirit and energy from Istanbul. During this meeting we decided to call our new exhibition project Manifesta and to present it as a nomadic project in the East and the West. We had in mind to alternate every two years between a place in Western and Eastern Europe. But—with the exception of Lubljana in 2000—only places in the West have hosted Manifesta so far. The problem, of course, is that no city presenting a Manifesta can decorate its image as a biennial-city.

During the long ﬂight to Korea, Jonas Staal, New World Summit, 2012, installation thinking about this problem, a view at the 2012 Berlin Biennale. Photo: Lidia Rossner. sudden idea came to my mind: Courtesy of the artist and Why has no biennial city ever Berlin Biennale. invited Manifesta? This would mean that the Manifesta curators from time to time could work within an existing infrastructure.

This would mean that an always low local budget could merge with the Manifesta budget. This would mean that Eastern European biennial cities could function in this East–West dialogue. I address this to the present representatives from Moscow, Prague, Tiﬂis, and Bucharest. And why not even a plan outside of Europe once? In Shanghai, or here, in Gwangju? The result would be a marriage of biennials, an enrichment on practice for both bodies. I seriously recommend this possibility as a point of discussion for a future Biennale Association.

Art signiﬁes a lively diversity, and that’s why, from a global perspective, we need as many biennials and as many concepts as possible. Even if I recognize the hazards that can come from large shows, I also believe that they are the only way to reach a wider audience. The designation “biennial” doesn’t guarantee a good exhibition—indeed, I’ve seen too many disappointing ones. But the biennial exhibition form guarantees that the next one will be different, and the next one different from that, and so on—a rose is not a rose is not a rose. To create an important event, the curator’s sense of the location is as important to the result as his or her international network.

Notes 1 Marius Babias, “On the History and Presence of Cultural Ideology,” lecture delivered at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, August 6, 2000. 2 Ibid. 3 AICA (International Association of Art Critics), CIAM (Center for International Arts Management), IKT (Internationale Kunstausstellungsleitertagung, International Conference of Art Exhibition Directors).

36 Vol. 12 No. 3